Prepared from combined newswire services reports. Items that follow:
Six Cuban refugees repatriated
Date: 96-06-21
MIAMI - Six Cuban refugees picked up off the Florida Keys this week were returned to Cuba Friday, the U.S. Coast Guard said.
The refugees were among seven Cubans spotted on a 14-foot sailboat about 35 miles southeast of Marathon, Florida, Tuesday, the Coast Guard said.
Six were returned to Cuba at Bahia de Cabanas. The seventh was taken to Key West, Florida and turned over to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Coast Guard said.
Cuban refugees frequently are found aboard small boats or rafts in the Florida Straits as they try to escape the Communist-ruled island and reach the United States. The Coast Guard has picked up 145 Cuban asylum-seekers in 1996. Return
Subj: Freeport CEO warns companies on Cuba
Date: 96-06-21
TORONTO, June 21 - Sherritt International Corp should beware the fate of U.S. firms that lost assets to the Cuban government, the chief executive of Freeport-McMoRan, from which Sherritt's Cuba base metals mine was expropriated, said on Friday.
Sherritt, a target of the U.S. push to tighten sanctions on foreign investors in Cuba, operates a nickel-cobalt mine expropriated from Louisiana-based Freeport by the Castro regime after the 1959 revolution.
Sherritt operates the mine as a joint venture with a Cuban state company.
"People paid nothing for this asset. They just took it over," Moffett said. "I think Sherritt ought to look at it and say how would they feel about it (if it happened to them)," Moffett added.
After the U.S. passage of the Helms-Burton Act in March, Washington sent a letter to Sherritt threatening to bar Sherritt officers and relatives from entering the United States while the company is involved in Cuba.
"Whatever happens here, people need to be thoughtful, because this is a deal where it may be (Sherritt's) oxen in the ditch at some point later on," Freeport chief executive James Moffett said in an interview at the Forbes CEO forum.
Sherritt officials were unavailable for comment. Moffett said foreign companies needed to put themselves in the shoes of U.S. firms that lost property in the Cuban expropriation because the resolution of the situation will set an important precedent for how foreign companies are treated in developing countries.
The Helms-Burton law was passed after Cuba shot down two U.S. light aircraft, which it said had violated its airspace.
The law allows U.S. companies and citizens to sue foreign companies that acquired former U.S. properties in Cuba.
Canada's government said it would amend a law to allow Canadian companies threatened by Helms-Burton to countersue or to block implementation of U.S. rulings.
Moffett said the Cuba issue was now in the hands of international governments and that he asked only that those examining the issue act equitably.
"It's hard to say (how much money we lost)," Moffatt said. Return
Cuba unhappy with commission report on plane downings
Date: 96-06-23
HAVANA - Cuba will formally protest the report of a commission investigating the February downing by Cuban fighters of two U.S. civilian planes when the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organisation meets this week, official news reports said Sunday.
Juventud Rebelde newspaper said Cuba has asked the Council to order the investigating commission ``to complete the document, newly examine its lack of precision and contradictions as well as contribute additional elements.''
The two planes, belonging to an anti-Castro Miami-based group called Brothers to the Rescue were hit by air-to-air missiles fired by the Cuban fighters. The bodies of the planes' four crewmen were never recovered.
Cuba claimed the planes had flown into Cuban air space while the U.S. government said they were outside the island's jurisdictional limits.
Last week, U.S Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff, at a briefing at the White House, said the commission's report, which had not yet been officially released, concluded that the two Brothers to the Rescue planes were over international waters when they were downed.
Tarnoff said the report showed also ``that there was no justification for that outrageous action and that the Cubans did not attempt to follow standard international norms in warning the aircraft.''
The United States has announced it will ask the United Nations Security Council to sanction Cuba for the incident.
Juventud Rebelde said Cuba had handed in documents, radar data, original recording of the conversations between the pilots and control tower and interviews with witnesses which showed the planes were in Cuban air space and that the intruders had been warned.
The president of Cuba's parliament, Ricardo Alarcon, who represented his nation at the meetings of the Montreal-based ICAO, said that ``there is a certain inclination in the report to take as God-given words anything that came from the American side.''
Alarcon, who is also a member of the politburo of Cuba's Communist Party, said ``there is a suspicion that there was a marriage between the investigating commission and the United States''. He added that the chief of Air Navigation of the ICAO is a U.S. representative, to whom the head of the investigating commission is subordinated.
The newspaper said Cuba suspects the recordings given to the investigating commission by U.S authorities ``contain serious adulterations to try to demonstrate that the incident took place outside the jurisdictional limits of Cuba''.
Brothers to the Rescue has organized routine weekend patrols of the Straits of Florida to search for Cubans fleeing the island on rafts and small boats. When it makes a sighting, it notifies the U.S. Coast Guard.
It has called for measures to bring down Fidel Castro's communist government and its planes have alledgedly overflown Cuban air space in some instances in acts of solidarity with the internal Cuban dissident movement.
On May 16, 1996, the U.S Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued an emergency order which revoked the pilot's certficate of Jose Basulto, founder and chief of Brothers to the Rescue.
The order said the revocation was ``was based on evidence ... of two unauthorized operations related to incursions into the Cuban airspace by Mr.Jose Basulto on July 13, 1995 and on Feb. 24, 1996'', the same day the downing of the two planes took place. Return
Trade disputes threaten Clinton at G7 summit
Date: 96-06-23
WASHINGTON, June 23 - President Bill Clinton may hope to have an edge over other Group of Seven leaders at this week's summit due to the strong performance of the U.S. economy, but disputes over trade policy could prove his Achilles heel.
``The level of frustration with U.S. trade policy is really mounting,'' said Jeffery Garten, a former Clinton administration official who now heads the Yale School of Management. ``It's becoming a source of great anxiety.''
America's allies in the G7 industrial nations are particularly concerned by what they consider high-handed efforts by the United States to impose its laws on foreign nations through economic and other sanctions.
Canada has already signalled that it intends to raise the issue of America's so-called Helms-Burton law at the three-day G7 summit which starts in Lyon, France, on Thursday.
The law, named after its main Republican sponsors in Congress, Senator Jesse Helms from North Carolina and Representative Dan Burton from Indiana, targets foreign companies investing or trading in Cuban properties confiscated from U.S. citizens and firms after Fidel Castro took power in 1959.
``We will be raising it at the G7,'' Canadian International Trade Minister Art Eggleton said.
Clinton had been hoping to use the summit -- which brings together the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States -- to showcase his success in creating jobs and promoting economic growth.
``The largest seven economies in the world have created a total of 10 million jobs in the last three and a half years, 9.7 million of them in the United States,'' Clinton said in a speech last week. ``That's something (to)...be proud of.''
But allies' criticism of U.S. unilateralism is threatening to overshadow those accomplishments and spoil Clinton's efforts to use the summit to trumpet his economic policies in this presidential election year.
Gary Hufbauer, a trade expert at the Institute for International Economics think tank, said that U.S. officials preparing the summit had tried to quiet down America's critics, but to little avail.
``They (the allies) really are peeved at the United States,'' he said.
The European Union last week condemned U.S. legislation which would punish companies doing business with Iran and Libya. The legislation, which has been passed by the House of Representatives but not yet by the Senate, is modelled on the Helms-Burton law but is not nearly as draconian.
Perhaps sensing that in this case the best defence might be a good offence, U.S. officials have tried to turn the tables on America's allies by calling on them to take action on their own against such states as Iran and Libya.
``There is an almost universal view that Iran and Libya present enormous problems to the world community with respect to terrorism and other issues,'' U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin said last week.
``And yet, while nations will all sit around and agree with that...we are prepared to act in that respect and many others are not,'' said Rubin, who will attend the summit.
Yale's Garten thinks that Clinton could even turn the dispute over U.S. trade policy to his political advantage.
``The image of a president that is standing up for U.S. rights...will play very well in an election year,'' he said.
Such election-year considerations will probably ensure that other trade issues -- from the possible launch of a new round of international trade talks to China's entry to the World Trade Organisation -- will be given short shrift at the summit.
``For the United States, the focus is going to be almost entirely on how it's going to play at home with regard to the election,'' Garten said.
``Nobody would dare take the chance of looking at the longer term if there is a possibility there will be a short-term criticism during the election.''